Manifest Gallery is not shy about being ambitious in its prompts for exhibitions, and few shows that I have seen there are more ambitious than “MARK: About the Artist’s Hand.” The mark is very close to the molecule of art. Many of the questions and ideas raised by this show could readily be applied to […]

Summerfair began in 1968, more than fifty years ago, as something of a street fair that spilled over into all the available spaces in Mt. Adams. It became more professionalized (juries and the like) in its first move to Coney Island, and then in the 1970s it moved to the Riverfront area, which is where […]

I would say that in my experience, The Contemporary Arts Center has not been the sort of museum much interested in exploring the tastes and talents of Cincinnati, let alone the Midwest at large. To do that might require, for example, regular curated exhibits of the artists of the region, and they haven’t done that. […]

I can’t think of the last art show I saw where I wanted to write, off the top, about its sound track. In the course of two visits to “Simply Brilliant,” the Cincinnati Art Museum’s stunning two-room exhibit of some 120 pieces of extremely fine jewelry from the master designers of the 1960s and 1970s—all […]

Clay and the Human Imprint: “Social Recession” at the Weston Gallery March 13-April 24, 2021; “Multi-Cultural Fellowship Exhibition” at DAAP Meyers Gallery, February 22-March 21, 2021; “Artifact: Ceramic-based Works,” “There is a Fly on a Plate” and “Firstlings,” “Sublimation,” all at Manifest Gallery, March 5-April 2, 2021; and “Sanctuary” at the Contemporary Arts Center, March […]

It’s long been discussed whether Duveneck’s lasting contribution to American art is more as a painter or a teacher. As a painter, his influence has been hard to characterize, but as teacher his impact is easier to trace.  At various times and places, he was a mentor to artists as diverse as John Henry Twachtman, […]

Editor’s Note: This show has been extended until August 15, 2021 In writing about Bukang Yu Kim’s extraordinary solo show of ten paintings at the Dayton Art Institute, I need to make two disclosures. First, I confess to coming late to an appreciation of her marvelous and powerful work, though I’ve had plenty of chances […]

“Art Ascendant” at Cincinnati Art Galleries on 6th Street is a great show to see on a fall day. It’s a full show, with about 100 works on display by about 20 artists covering all of the gallery’s walls. The exhibit drew upon many of the CAG’s stable of living painters (and one sculptor). In […]

In the 18th and 19th centuries, there was a popular genre of fiction known as “It-Narratives” or “Novels of Circulation,” which told their stories in the voice of some object which passes through many hands. Some of the earliest of these began with money (the story, say, of a bank note): the genre spread to […]

The biggest current project at the Cincinnati Art Museum has nothing to do with the permanent art collections under its roof. Rather, it is a monumental set of steps—164 in all—connecting the north end of the CAM’s main parking lot to the corner of Gilbert Avenue and Eden Park Drive. At nine stories tall, it’s […]

James VanDerZee (1886-1983) produced somewhere between 75,000 and 100,000 photographs in his creative lifetime, maybe even more, almost all of them of African Americans who lived in or were passing through Harlem. He had a fraught relationship to street photography and worked predominantly out of his studio. At the height of his career in the […]

A few years ago, way back when art could still be encountered in person, Emily Bauman, Photography Curatorial Assistant at the CAM, wrote an online note about the experience of being able to handle and see up close a cyanotype by Anna Atkins, the figure who is generally credited with being the first woman photographer […]

The High Renaissance portrait sought to depict dignity—the sense of worthiness that was, typically, an even more valuable quality in a portrait than likeness—in repose. The great 16th century portraits tried to capture what was least changing about their subjects. Though the period knew, of course, that human beings were subject to time, they assumed […]

I was looking forward to reviewing the N. C. Wyeth show at the Taft, and was planning on seeing it on a Sunday with my wife. We’d see the show, have brunch, check out the gift shop. On Friday the 13th—I know, right?—I went online to check out the museum’s hours—is it that they open […]

When I first came to Cincinnati, I was told that I-75 had been designed by someone who had heard of an interstate highway but never actually seen one. At times, it feels like it was little more than a good guess on the builders’ part. I-75 sprouts red barrels as empty fields sprout crabgrass, and […]

Sohrab Hura is a young Indian photographer (b. 1981) who in 2016 came to the cities, towns, and countryside that stretch along the Mississippi River from Cairo, Illinois, down to the Gulf of Mexico, looking to understand a section of the United States that was profoundly unfamiliar to him. Along the way, he wanted to […]

This is a big show with a big story to tell, one that both celebrates and critically examines what it means to be Hispanic. The show focuses on, but is not limited to, European Spain, which it follows through many of its incarnations: an ancient civilization, a Roman outpost, a Christian outpost, a center of […]

I grew up in New York, and so the Hudson River was the river of my childhood. As a child, I thought of it starting in New York City rather than ending there, and then it went, straight and broad, some 300 miles north into the mysterious territory those from the city called “upstate.” It […]

Some art work we are likely to do alone, as little outside assistance is required: street photography, for example, or sketching wildflowers in the woods, or singing in the shower. Other types require support systems of various sorts: a string quartet or bronze casting. Artists frequently pool their resources to draw nude models, though they […]

“Magnitude Seven” is neither the oldest nor the smallest show of small things in town, a distinction that probably goes to the Art Academy’s “Minumental” show every fall, which has run for over thirty years, and requires that each work be no larger than two inches in any direction. Jason Franz, Founding Executive Director and […]

Well, despite what the show’s title might suggest, it’s not a blockbuster Rembrandt show. As the exhibition catalogue delicately notes, “we cannot be sure Rembrandt ever visited Dordrecht,” one of the oldest cities in all of the Netherlands and the fifth largest in its province after Rotterdam, The Hague, and Leiden. The show definitely will […]

Whatever you think of the outcome, the Dayton Art Institute’s exhibit of 100 paintings from the collection of the National Academy of Design has been curated multiple times and by multiple standards. Since its founding in 1826, current members of the National Academy (NA) have chosen the artists who will admitted each year to add […]

The visual richness of Paris during the Belle Epoque would have followed people wherever they went, even out of doors. Posters must have been everywhere, depicting products for sale and announcing events and attractions both large and small on lithographed newsprint affixed to walls, fences, and kiosks specially designed for the purpose. The marketing of […]

High modernism is well over a century old by now, and its roots are even older. How could that even have happened? The Phillips Collection in Washington D.C. was the first American museum devoted to modern art, opening in 1921, some eight years before MOMA. Though the title of the loan show at the Taft […]

In Cole Carothers’s “Margin” (2008), we are in Northern Kentucky somewhere—I’m thinking probably Monmouth Street—where the roadway dips down under some train tracks. There is no glamor here, at least not in a conventional sense. Where we are has been zoned for what is called light industry, which typically means that the factories are neither […]

FotoFocus 2018 promised, in its thematic title, to burrow into the archives, and at the CAC, they uncovered something. The roots of its show, “No Two Alike,” go back to an artistic event of mid- to high-Modernism, when, in 1929, a small London gallery belonging to Dorothy Warren brought together the photographs of Karl Blossfeldt […]

Ann Segal hasn’t done an ad for the iPhone camera, but—if it weren’t for her decision a long time ago to walk away from the commercial side of photography—she could. For the last 10 years of a 45 year career of taking photographs, she has exclusively used her iPhone, with remarkable success. In a professional […]

There is nothing ordinary about Erika NJ Allen’s photographs of downtown Cincinnati. Taken with a pinhole camera set at an exposure of nine days, the city looks as if it has been underwater for a millennium. We are not likely to take the pictures’ minimal suggestions of color for granted. It is unsettling how they […]

Any way you look at it, there was a lot going on in American culture in the 1940s and 1950s. There was a hot war and then a Cold War. American heavy industry had never been more dominant at home and abroad, and union membership was at an all-time high. Car manufacturing and ownership was […]

One way to see the goal of the Ansel Adams show at the Taft is that it traces the trajectory of Adams’s aesthetic and accomplishments from some of his earliest Pictorialist photos in the 1920s to a climax of sorts with his iconic “Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico” (1941). As the show begins, Adams is a […]

It’s an ordinary day in Turtle Creek, Pennsylvania, about a dozen miles from Pittsburgh. Some leaves are turning yellow; there is a touch of fall in the air. The garbage has been collected and the mail has not yet been delivered (the cans are upside down along the edge of the street and the flags […]

  You can be forgiven if you’d never heard of Guido Cagnacci before going to see the tiny but brilliant exhibit of three of his works at the Cincinnati Art Museum. You won’t find him in your Janson, or, for that matter, in many more weighty volumes devoted to Italian painters of the 17th century. […]

Up, then down. Up, then down. And now, up again. Saul Steinberg’s “Mural of Cincinnati,” having adorned the walls of the Terrace Plaza Hotel’s Skyline Restaurant (better known as The Gourmet Room) from 1948 until it was sold, and then the walls of the Cincinnati Art Museum until it was walled in to mount the […]

One of the least sculptural of the wondrous works at the mid-career retrospective of sculptor Glenn Kaino’s work at the Contemporary Arts Center is a two-dimensional graphic that looks like an ancient map that has been housed in an archive with a leaky roof. Shapes and outlines are beautiful but discontinuous; areas that might represent […]

The Reformation had its 500th anniversary this year. A movement that changed the ways Europeans read, worshipped, traded, and slaughtered each other, it also had the potential to change the nature of art. In part, this is because the various Protestant churches that sought to reform the Catholic hegemony tended, among other things, to take […]

As you walk into Caza Sikes in Oakley to see the ambitious mini-retrospective of Cole Carothers’s paintings, you are greeted by a large scale self-portrait called “Livestrong” (2005). In it, he is standing in what for many of his paintings is his home away from home, the corner of his studio. It is brashly hung—it […]

  In the Music Room at the Taft, all of the paintings are grand. A few are truly monumental. In the Taft’s Sinton Room right now is an exhibition of another sort of painting, eight of them in all, the largest dimension of which is just a hair over a foot and a half tall. […]

Though the show is titled “Wild About Wildflowers,” the Lloyd’s current show is constrained in many ways. It is a truly small exhibit, taking up little more than a half dozen standing cases, though it is also an absorbing show: there was a guy who was there when I arrived still looking at things when […]

Aeqai’s Editor-in-Chief, Daniel Brown, recently received a Lifetime Achievement award from Marquis Who’s Who, which has been recognizing American accomplishments in a variety of fields since 1899. I sat down with Danny earlier this month and we talked informally about his perspective on the art world and some of the various roles he has had […]

A show about the nude can’t help but raise issues about voyeurism any more than it can help raise questions about sexual politics. (I counted, for example, only four representations of the male nude to nearly twenty female.) This is the Manifest Gallery’s ninth show featuring the naked body, and I would have liked to […]

  A careful visitor to the Cincinnati Art Museum’s very substantial exhibition of paintings, sculptures, furniture, documents, implements, and advertisements of many sorts might well leave with no clearer idea about what constitutes “folk art” than when he or she came in. What, exactly, are we looking at? We’re not even sure what to call […]

One doesn’t immediately think of the British for their heritage of great painting. As Britain rose as a great mercantile power starting in the 16th century, it had to import painters, typically from Northern Europe, to their isolated island. For two hundred years, those foreigners largely defined English visual accomplishments and taste. British portraiture never […]

Sometime in the 1980s, Michael Scheurer came across an Italian toy called a Puncherino. A Puncherino is a little like what in my neighborhood we called a BoLo, a toy for one which had a lightweight wooden paddle with a rubber ball attached by an elastic cord (always the first thing to break). The difference, […]

As you work your way through the drawings on view in the pleasant warren of rooms at Manifest Gallery, something wonderful happens when you reach Lucas Bianchi’s “Self Portrait in Studio” (2016). The energy of Bianchi’s drawing is everywhere in evidence, and it tells you this is a young man mad about drawing. We’ve interrupted […]

Rembrandt’s apparently substantial interest in things Jewish has been matched by western culture’s interest in Rembrandt’s interest in things Jewish. This has led to a range of misconceptions over the last century and a half: for example, he was Jewish (he wasn’t), or that he sought out Jewish models because they had individuality and character […]

“The Poetry of Place” is a small show at the Cincinnati Art Museum, with only 18 photographs by only three artists, William Clift, Michael Kenna, and Linda Connor, the works all selected from the Museum’s permanent collection and organized by Curatorial Assistant of Photography Emily Bauman. In recent years, there have been some outstanding museum […]

Okay, I’ll go first. In my decades of getting to know and love the Cincinnati Art Museum’s permanent collection, I had never really liked Van Gogh’s “Into the Undergrowth,” painted a month or so before he died in 1890 at the end of a whirlwind career that lasted no longer than ten years. “Into the […]

My place to start thinking about Roe Ethridge’s work and sensibility is his “Thanksgiving 1984 (table)” (2009). It captures the artist’s love of surface, an almost obsessive attention to the glimmering outsides of things unmatched, in some ways, since baroque and rococo paintings of the 17th and 18th centuries. The picture sees it all: Thanksgiving’s […]

In an undated and untitled photograph by Robert C. May, we are standing at the edge of some unremarkable woods, separated by a paved road from more woods on the other side. The view is dominated by four scruffy trees, no two of which are standing at quite the same angle. The road is as […]

Kevin Moore, an Independent curator and writer based in New York, has been the Artistic Director and Curator for FotoFocus since 2013. He earned his PhD in Art History at Princeton and has worked as a curator at Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum. He has written books about Lartigue and color photography in America (in conjunction […]

Emerson’s idea of how to see Nature was to look up; Thoreau’s idea of how to see Nature was to look down. It drove Emerson crazy. Instead of becoming a great Transcendalist thinker, Thoreau, to Emerson’s mind, went huckleberrying. While Emerson sought to capture the Universal Soul in Nature, Thoreau bent over and watched red […]

In the past 35 or so years, Joel Meyerowitz has seen more than a dozen monographs of his photographs published, and has contributed pictures and text to others. He has become known by now, more or less successively, as a street photographer (one of the earliest to have worked extensively in color), a landscape photographer, […]

Carl Solway (and family) have been so deeply entwined with the art gallery scene in Cincinnati that it takes a timeline on the wall to keep it all straight. He graduated from Walnut Hills in 1952; ten years later, he opened Flair Gallery at Fifth and Race. Ten years after that, he had two galleries […]

If your appetite for Van Gogh was whetted by the five wonderful canvases shown at the Taft Museum’s current “Impressions of Landscape,” you should promptly schedule a road trip to Chicago where the Art Institute is showing “Van Gogh’s Bedrooms,” an exhibition designed to contextualize the three different versions Van Gogh painted of “The Bedroom” […]

In the early 1970s, Jo Ann Callis left Cincinnati, where she had grown up, for California. Some forty years later, FotoFocus brought her back. On February 24, 2016, she gave a lecture—really an annotated slide show of her work—at the Cincinnati Art Museum as part of its Lecture and Visiting Artist Series, and the following […]

Artists have career, or even mid-career, retrospectives; galleries, less frequently. Many galleries don’t last as long as a successful artist’s career; fewer still have something that needs to be said or demonstrated about their having arrived at two or three or more decades. The Alice F. and Harris K. Weston Gallery, having successfully shown work […]

How newly-founded must an American art museum be not to be awash in paintings by the painters of the Barbizon School, either on display or, perhaps more likely these days, in storage? The works of Corot, Rousseau, Millet, Daubigny, and a number of artists loosely allied with them represent an important but frequently not fully […]

In the artist’s statement accompanying Matthew Metzger’s showing of ten new paintings at Miller Gallery, Metzger articulately lays out some of his goals: “In an overwhelming landscape, harsh, indifferent, opposite to arguably our most endearing human traits, we recognize our humanness.” In a nutshell, Metzger is here describing our relationship to the sublime, an aesthetic […]

It was a pretty perfect moment. For one evening and the whole day following, FotoFocus and the Contemporary Arts Center teamed up to sponsor and host three panel discussions and three keynote speakers to talk about the making of Mapplethorpe the artist, the making of the CAC’s 1990 show “The Perfect Moment” and subsequent trial, […]

First of all, forget the unicorn. Or at the very least, hold it in abeyance. X-ray analysis of the painting shows us that before there was a unicorn on this young woman’s lap, there used to be a dog. And before skilled restoration turned it back into a unicorn again in the early 20th century, […]

It’s fair to wonder on what basis we can be sure that the wonderful series of recent paintings by Stewart Goldman, curated by Aaron Cowan, are landscapes. Many are horizontal—some even lusciously elongated—but not all. The artist has provided a number of keys to help us see the landscape elements that inspired these mostly non-representational […]

Jan Tilens and Hendrick van Balen’s “Expansive Mountain Valley Landscape with a Rainbow and the Hunt of Diana” is a classic example of a “Weltlandschaft,” or world landscape, the sort of picture that first drew Otto Christian Fassbender and his wife Renate to assemble their outstanding collection of 17th century paintings now on view at […]

Frank Benson, an artist probably best known today for an oeuvre of duck hunting etchings that are, oddly, both academic and commercial, self-identified enthusiastically as an Impressionist: “I follow the light, where it comes from and where it goes.” The Dayton Art Institute is hosting an exhibit of more than a hundred paintings from the […]

If you had wanted an education in the transition from the 19th to the 20th centuries in American culture, the Taft Museum has been the place to be. In the past year and a half, the Taft has hosted the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art’s collection of American daguerreotypes, “Telling Tales” from the New-York Historical Society, […]

Brian Sholis, the new Associate Curator of Photography at the Cincinnati Art Museum, says from the start that he has no training—“none at all”—in Art History. He sees himself as “a contemporary art person who zeroed in on photography,” as he explained in an interview with Aeqai earlier this year. His undergraduate degree was in […]

The art historical narratives of the history of photography and the advent of modernism are often intertwined, though in some of those narratives, photography helps facilitate modernism, and in others, modernism gives photography the nudge it needs to outgrow its 19th century roots. As the captions on one of the walls at the Taft note, […]

Street photography was a movement initially made possible by cameras that were small, film that was fast, and hands that were steady. It refreshed photography as an art form by opening up an almost unlimited source of unscripted narrative. It required some skills of the photographer not unlike those needed by an undercover cop: you […]

1989 was a watershed year for the art of photography in Cincinnati. Kristin Spangenberg published her catalogue Photographic Treasures from the Cincinnati Art Museum, which recorded the results of her having been given funding to purchase one hundred photographs to give the Museum’s existing but scattershot photographic holdings some shape and a sure anchor in […]

by Jonathan Kamholtz Taft Musuem of Art, June 13, 2014-September 14, 2014 There is plenty of spiritual energy in the great landscape paintings of 19th century America, but it is usually Emersonian in nature–Christian by implication and default rather than intention. That spirit is sometimes dreamy and solitary, and sometimes busy with life and labor. […]

by Jonathan Kamholtz April 8, 2014-May 16, 2014 Joomi Chung’s “Atlas 4” (2011) is an acetate scroll of indeterminate length, standing like an elephantine roll of film on one of its edges, allowing us to scrutinize some of its intricate webs of markings. It has been covered with networks of (mostly) black ink, some of […]

by Jonathan Kamholtz Dayton Art Institute February 22, 2014-May 18, 2014 Many years ago, I saw a group of photographs of tulips in bloom, pulled out of the ground, dirt still clinging to the bulbs and roots, captured after they had been laid out horizontally on a table. They were part of a group show […]

by Jonathan Kamholtz Cincinnati Art Museum February 14, 2014-May 11, 2014 In Jean Restout’s “Pygmalion and Galatea,” the statue of Galatea, newly come to life, spreads her arms and bares her breasts to the adoring sculptor. She seems less surprised at her new incarnation than he does; he gazes at him with a sophisticated, impish […]

by Jonathan Kamholtz December 12, 2013-February 3, 2014 If you look to your left when you walk into Miami University’s cozy Hiestand Gallery, you’ll see “Lucy” (2013), a statuesque portrait of a standing baby. She is turning away from us, pleasurably but implacably following some agenda of her own. She could be a guardian figure […]

Iconoclast’s Dilemma: Object of Devotion: Medieval English Alabaster Sculpture from the Victoria and Albert Museum Dayton Art Institute
October 26, 2013-January 5, 2014 By Jonathan Kamholtz In “Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem,” sculpted in alabaster in England sometime between 1450 and 1470, eight carved figures, full or fully suggested, greet Christ as he arrives on his donkey. […]

Deconstructing America: Telling Tales: Stories and Legends in 19-Century American Art Taft Museum of Art
September 20, 2013-January 12, 2014 By Jonathan Kamholtz “Telling Tales” at the Taft makes its case for American art the hard way.  This excellent loan exhibit from the New-York Historical Society surveys American painting with very few of the go-to works […]

Singing for Myself: Seeing Opera Alice F. and Harris K. Weston Art Gallery
June 14–August 31, 2013 By Jonathan Kamholtz Mr. Sousaphone, the main character in Jay Bolotin’s remarkable 22-minute video “Kharmen,” makes it back home after a long and dangerous and partly hallucinatory urban trek. He puts an old vinyl—or possible even shellac—version of Carmen […]

Pictures and Property:   Photographic Wonders:
  American Daguerreotypes from The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art May 17–August 25, 2013 By Jonathan Kamholtz “Photographic Wonders,” a selection of daguerreotypes culled from the extraordinary collection put together by Hallmark and then given in 2005 to Kansas City’s Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, is the real deal. In the ten […]

Gazes and Shadows: Continuity and Change: The Return to Figurative Painting Cincinnati Art Galleries, May 3–June 8 By Jonathan Kamholtz “Continuity and Change” is a big and ambitious show, curated by Daniel Brown, the Editor of Aeqai who has written about art, been an art dealer, and an independent curator for several decades. The show […]

The Pits: Empire Falling: New Photographs by Elena Dorfman Phyllis Weston Gallery, March 29-May 11 By Jonathan Kamholtz From a distance, “Empire Falling #6” (the artist’s titles are not very helpful as aide-memoires or to help us focus on the picture’s issues) might be a colorized photograph taken by a long-gone intrepid nineteenth century archeological […]

“The River Having A Strong Flow”:  Storm—Watershed—Riverbank The 1913 Flood Dayton Art Institute, February 23-May 5, 2013 By Jonathan Kamholtz Associate Curator Jane A. Black has curated a trio of shows to commemorate the centennial of the flood of the Great Miami River. In March 1913, following a series of wet winter storms, the river […]

Greg Storer at La Poste Eatery by Jonathan Kamholtz As you walk into the space where Greg Storer’s paintings are hanging, to your left are two small pictures of cars parked at a drive-in, their screens towering above mostly empty landscapes. One painting features a scene from The Godfather (1972) (“And That Day May Never Come”), […]

Rituals and Enactments: The Self-Portraits of Anne Arden McDonald October 15, 2012 through February 22, 2013 Iris BookCafe and Gallery ~ Jonathan Kamholtz In Anne Arden McDonald’s “Self-Portrait #20, Utah, 1989” (her titles are generally not helpful or revealing), the artist depicts herself on her knees with a semicircle of lit candles in front of […]

Landscapes of the Mind:  Metaphor, Archetype, and Symbol: 1971-2012 October 5, 2012 through January 10, 2013 YWCA Women’s Art Gallery By Jonathan Kamholtz In Jane Alden Stevens’s “Windbreak Netting,” a mesh curtain hangs between us and the apples growing on a tree in Aomori Prefecture, Japan. The curtain protects the apples, but also serves to […]

Cole Carothers’s Outdoor and Indoor Light By Jonathan Kamholtz If you go to “Building Sight(s),” Cole Carothers’s new exhibit at the 5Th Street Gallery, looking forward to seeing works in the artist’s traditional look, you may be disappointed. For more than three decades, Carothers has produced paintings that explore the continuities and discontinuities of space. Built […]

Editor’s Note:  Aeqai is pleased to announce to our readers that long-time critic and collector Jon Kamholtz has joined aeqai as a regular critic.  Kamholtz teaches in the English Deparment at The University of Cincinnati, and begins with our September issue by selecting a painting from the permanent collection of the  Cincinnati Art Museum for […]